Another key federal regulation is the Resource is the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) of 1976, which gave the EPA the authority to regulate hazardous materials throughout their entire life cycle, including generation, transportation, treatment, storage, and disposal. As a consequence, RCRA is often said to regulate hazardous waste from “cradle to grave.” Note that CERCLA focuses on abandoned and historical waste sites, whereas RCRA regulates the handling of hazardous materials before they are discarded as waste.
A key result of these regulations is that the federal government exerted its authority over individual and states’ rights in order to protect citizens and the nation as a whole. Although many people disagreed with this intrusion, the essential issue came down to whether people have the inherent right to clean air and water, or do individuals and businesses have the right to freely dump wastes into the environment. This issue of personal rights has led to a backlash against the environmental movement in recent years, led largely by well-funded industry and political action groups. During this debate people often forget that prior to these regulations, the states were unable to control pollution on their own and it took the power of the federal government to reign in polluters. Today the most visible and obvious forms of pollution have largely been eliminated, leaving more subtle but still dangerous forms of pollution. Because pollution in the United States is now largely invisible, citizens tend to believe it is no longer a problem.
Ironically, people in the rapidly industrializing countries of Asia are now experiencing levels of pollution (Figure 15.3) once found in the United States. It seems reasonable to expect that these people will eventually rise up and demand that pollution be brought under control just as Americans did 30 years ago.
Pollution and Contamination
Throughout most of history, humans have drunk freshwater directly from rivers and lakes, which naturally contain various types of compounds and dissolved ions from the weathering of rocks as well as bacteria. However, if the concentration of ions (salts) or bacteria becomes too high, it can have an adverse impact on human health. For example, freshwater is defined as containing less than 1,000 milligrams per liter (mg/l) of dissolved salts, whereas the EPA has set 500 mg/l as the safe limit for human consumption. Drinking ocean water can be fatal for humans because it averages around 35,000 mg/l dissolved salts, which is 70 times greater than the EPA’s drinking-water limit.
In this chapter we will use the term polluted to describe those situations where a substance has been introduced into the air or water and has reached concentrations that are harmful to living organisms. In contrast, contaminated is when the concentration of a substance is above natural levels, but is not harmful. Although the two terms are technically different, they are often used synonymously because most people incorrectly assume anything that is contaminated must also be unsafe. Imagine you poured some milk in a glass of water. The water would technically be contaminated since milk is not naturally found in water, but yet the mixture would be perfectly safe to drink. It is also important to note that pollution is a relative term that varies from organism to organism. For example, the drinking limit of dissolved salts for humans is 500 mg/l, whereas most farm livestock can tolerate up to 5,000 mg/l. This means water with a salt content of 1,000 mg/l would be considered polluted for human usage, but yet safe for livestock. Moreover, some substances may be harmful to one species and not others. Elevated levels of copper and zinc, for example, are deadly to certain types of fish, but relatively harmless to humans.
One of the difficulties with respect to pollution is identifying those substances that are harmful to people. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution there has been a wide range of organic and inorganic substances making their way to our rivers and aquifers from factories and agricultural fields. Determining which of these chemicals is causing health problems in humans is complicated by the fact that over 75,000 chemicals are currently being manufactured in the United States alone, and over 1,000 new ones are being developed each year. Obviously, performing exhaustive and expensive laboratory studies on such a large number of chemicals is simply not feasible. Although drugs undergo considerable testing in the United States, government agencies have no health data on nearly 70% of all of chemicals entering the environment.
Because direct tests on humans involve ethical considerations and are very time consuming and expensive, scientists must extrapolate safe exposure levels for people based on animal testing. Mice or rats are commonly used because they are inexpensive and somewhat similar physiologically to humans (Figure 15.4). Different populations of mice are usually given unrealistically large doses of a substance, representing far more than what a human would likely ingest over a long time period at much lower concentrations. Based on the number of mice that develop a disease at different doses, scientists then extrapolate a concentration which people should be able to tolerate without developing the disease. A critical assumption is that a high dose over a short time period gives the same result as a low dose over a longer period. Moreover, mice and humans are assumed to have similar tolerances and respond in a similar manner to a given chemical. These assumptions obviously do not always hold, but given the limited amounts of time and money, such testing is the best method for setting “safe” exposure limits. Other types of studies examine unusually high rates of a specific disease among groups of people all exposed to the same substance, then make comparisons to rates found in the general population.
In the United States the EPA has been given the authority to determine which chemical substances to regulate, and then set standards for those deemed most likely to pose a risk to human health. In setting standards for a regulated contaminant, the EPA defines Maximum Contaminant Levels (MCLs) as the maximum allowable concentration for water supply systems providing drinking water to the public. The EPA has established MCLs for approximately 90 different chemical, microbial, and radiological contaminants. A representative sampling of these contaminants is provided in Table 15.1. Note in the table how contaminants come from a variety of sources and create specific types of health issues.